12 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Business Owners

Email marketing is dead, right?

Social media is taking over everything these days. As of March 2021, Facebook has 2.8 billion monthly active users. Twitter has 353 million. Instagram, 1.072 billion. And Snapchat? 347.3 million. Surely, no one bothers with email anymore, right?

Wrong!

If you think email is dead, just ask Radicati. They recently found that, by the start of 2019, there were 3.9 billion active email users with 5.59 billion active email accounts. That means that over half of the population of the entire world uses email.

So, if you’re not using email marketing, you’re making a huge mistake.

But your choice of email marketing service can make all the difference for your email marketing efforts because they determine whether or not your emails are actually delivered.

So, in this article, we shall be taking a look at the 12 best email marketing services for small business owners in 2021. The software and platforms presented here will help you attract high-quality leads that will benefit tremendously from your service or product.

You will be able to nurture your leads and keep your subscribers engaged, all while boosting your sales and potentially reaping a staggering 4,200% return on marketing investment (in other words, every dollar you spend on email marketing can potentially return $42).

Let’s get started!

Best Email Marketing Service for Small Business Owners

The best email marketing services make creating highly-engaging newsletters easy. Often, they come with an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop UI. These services provide email automation that allows you to easily send email campaigns that are not only targeted but also personalized.

They also ensure that your email campaigns end up in your targets’ inboxes, not in their spam folders. And, besides offering great delivery rates, they allow you to segment your contacts into groups, manage them, and track the performance of your campaigns.

Now, let’s take a look at the best email platforms so you can make an informed decision about what will best fit your business needs.

1. HubSpot Marketing

Best Overall Email Marketing Platform.

Being an all-in-one marketing hub that’s part of HubSpot’s Growth Stack bundle, HubSpot Marketing does way more than just email marketing. It is an advanced end-to-end marketing platform that consolidates all your marketing efforts into a single location and helps you grow traffic and increase conversions.

It even boasts a drag-and-drop website builder for building fully-responsive websites and landing pages, even if you’re not a techie. This feature comes in handy for building attractive and highly-effective landing pages to host your lead magnets or for any other campaigns you might launch.

Once you’re done designing your website, HubSpot Marketing helps you prepare engaging content and distribute it to the right audiences. It provides SEO and social suggestions to enable you to share your content with the right influencers and drive traffic, all with zero coding skills.

HubSpot Marketing is truly special in that it allows you to create engaging calls-to-action, as well as to personalize the messaging that each of your visitors receives. With HubSpot Marketing’s A/B tests and contact forms, you can also create successful lead generation strategies and decide which visitors can potentially be qualified leads.

Furthermore, the platform allows you to personalize each visitor’s journey through your funnel from first impression to close-of-sale. And afterwards, you can evaluate the success and impact of your strategy via advanced reporting.

HubSpot is known across the industry for its excellent customer support. By sending a simple message or making a call, you gain access to a friendly and knowledgeable agent to address your inquiries and help you solve any issues that may arise.

In addition, by becoming a HubSpot user, you become part of a large, growing community of highly-satisfied users and gain access to a rich library of resources that optimizes the value of the platform.

In truth, there’s so much more to the HubSpot Marketing Hub than can be covered in this article. Its vast feature set is unlike any other on the market, and it doesn’t just offer features for their own sake; it amalgamates all these features in a remarkably cohesive platform. For a truly end-to-end platform, HubSpot is hard to beat.

Pricing

HubSpot Marketing Hub offers a wealth of free marketing tools. The free tools include forms, ad management, email marketing, custom properties, a mobile app, and so on.

Pricing for the HubSpot Marketing Hub is in three plans: Starter, Professional, and Enterprise.

The Starter Plan starts at $50 monthly and gives you an email marketing platform, basic analytics, support for five currencies, etc.

The Professional Plan starts at $890 monthly and gives you access to the full marketing automation suite with custom workflows, lead nurturing, A/B testing, 100 inboxes, support for 30 currencies, and several other advanced features.

The Enterprise Plan starts at $3,200 monthly (this plan is billed annually) and you get 10,000 contacts, company-wide campaign reporting, revenue reporting, and custom event automation triggers.

Pros

• Integrates naturally with the HubSpot CRM, which is one of the best CRM software on the market
• Vast collection of free tools
• Remarkable marketing automation
• Integrates seamlessly with other HubSpot solutions
• Bountiful social media management options available

Cons

• Expensive
• SEO features can be improved
• Steep learning curve

2. Constant Contact

Best Email Marketing Service for Smaller Audiences.

A solid alternative to Mailchimp, Constant Contact is an all-in-one marketing software that boasts plenty of features to boost your marketing campaigns, including a website builder, email marketing automation, and social media ads.

Although it is an all-in-one platform, Constant Contact truly excels in email marketing. It offers more than 100 mobile-optimized email templates. The drag-and-drop editor is designed for easy customization. And the system makes implementation and campaign tracking easier with its integrations with platforms like WordPress, Salesforce, QuickBooks, and Shopify.

The software also comes with integrated tools to help you extend your email marketing efforts to social media. On the dashboard, you get tools for scheduling and sharing content to social media, and from there, you can engage in conversations with leads and clients.

The platform also offers real-time tracking and list segmentation tools that make it easy to track and improve on the results of your campaigns. And you get access to live support and expert advice to help you make the most of Constant Contact’s vast feature set.

Pricing

Two pricing plans are available for Constant Contact: Email and Email Plus. Overall, the price you pay depends on the number of contacts you have.

The Email Plan starts at $20 monthly and includes 3 users, unlimited monthly email sends, customizable templates, tracking & reporting, e-commerce marketing, a contacts database, list segmentation, A/B testing, basic automation, social media posting & monitoring, and many other features.

The Email Plus Plan starts at $45 monthly and features everything in the Email Plan plus e-commerce segmentation, polls & surveys, coupons, dynamic content, automated email behavioral series, and other advanced features.

Pros

• Intuitive, well-designed UI
• Social media campaign integration available
• Wide selection of commerce and event integrations

Cons

• Templates could be more flexible
• Pricing adds up quickly as your contact list grows

3. ActiveCampaign

Best Email Marketing Service for SMBs.

ActiveCampaign is a Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform that integrates various aspects of small business marketing into one user-friendly platform. The software allows you to easily create beautiful and engaging emails, launch social media marketing campaigns, learn more about your contacts, and automate your marketing campaigns with technology that was hitherto out of the reach of most small businesses.

While this tool includes remarkable email and messaging features, this cloud-based platform offers much more than most any traditional email service. Beyond emailing and messaging, it includes a robust and easy-to-use sales and marketing automation platform, as well as CRM functionality.

With Site Tracking functionality, you can observe your contact’s behavior on your website in real-time and reactively adapt your marketing to their interests. ActiveCampaign can see what they are doing on your website and log their entire page view history, attaching it to their contact record so you know what they have and haven’t done on your website.

With this information, you can segment your contacts to improve your targeting. For instance, you can separate contacts who have viewed your pricing page from those who haven’t gone beyond your home page. You can then target these groups with different campaigns or offers to get them to take the next step in the customer journey.

You can also alter content dynamically on a per-contact basis with Conditional Content. This feature means that you can display different images or text in your emails depending on how each contact is tagged.

For example, if you send out an email notifying your subscribers of a sale, you can show contacts who have viewed your pricing page different images or text from those who have viewed your about page. Or you can show them specific products they may have previously viewed.

Additionally, the platform also offers event tracking, an easy-to-use automation builder, email split testing, a sales CRM, and advanced lead scoring. ActiveCampaign integrates with more than 850 third-party apps and services, including accounting, analytics, sales, support, lead generation, and CMS applications.

Pricing

The Lite Plan starts at $9 monthly for 500 contacts and gives you access to marketing automation, unlimited email sends, campaign & automation reporting, over 850 integrations, and more than 540 automation recipes, among various other features.

The Plus Plan starts at $49 monthly for 500 contacts and includes everything in the Lite Plan plus custom-branded landing pages, contact scoring, advanced performance reporting, and custom-branded forms, among other features.

The Professional Plan starts at $129 monthly for 500 contacts and includes everything in the Plus Plan plus marketing attribution, predictive sending, and several other advanced features.

Finally, the Enterprise Plan starts at $229 monthly for 500 contacts and includes everything in the Professional Plan plus social data enrichment, unlimited email design testing, and other custom features.

Pros

• Remarkably powerful automation
• Advanced analytics and reporting
• Superb deliverability
• Extensive third-party integrations available
• Free migrations from other email services
• Online support is excellent

Cons

• The vast feature set may be overwhelming
• No phone support
• Comparatively short free trial

4. GetResponse

Best Email Marketing Platform for Ease of Use.

Vastly popular, GetResponse prides itself as being the easiest email marketing system in the world to use. Creating professional-looking emails and landing pages is simple and hassle-free with GetResponse.

GetResponse is such a great business solution because you don’t need to have a background in technology to understand the system and use its marketing and email automation tools in your business.

The solution comes packed with several powerful tools and features to boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns and deliver the results you want. With the intuitive email creator, you can create beautiful emails that are mobile-optimized. This means that your campaigns can reach and be relevant to people who access email from their smartphones and tablets.

Converting leads to customers is simplified with smart automation. If you’re new to email marketing, you also get webinars to help you improve your email strategies and improve the effectiveness of your campaign implementation.

Creating campaigns can be done with one of two available tools: build from scratch or use the email creator. The email creator comes bundled with over 500 professionally designed email templates to help you get started right away.

But you can choose to use the HTML tool if you prefer to code. And the system simplifies accurate lead targeting to help you improve your lead conversion rates and boost your sales.

Besides, there are several ways to develop a subscriber list with GetResponse. You can simply input the email addresses for smaller lists. Or you can import your list by uploading or linking with third-party solutions like Zendesk Support, Google, Salesforce, and others.

You can verify the imported email addresses and eliminate invalid ones with BriteVerify, which is a GetResponse partner service.

The dashboard displays everything about all your campaigns in one place. Here, you can track and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. You can view how many contacts received your email and how many of them opened it. The campaign tracking tool integrates with Google Analytics.

Getting reports delivered straight to your inbox is as simple as refreshing the tool. You can also find the info of specific contacts and view which campaigns you have sent to them in the past. You can view their open and click-through rates, too. With these insights, you can find out your most profitable customer segments to further hone your targeting.

GetResponse hosts a detailed Help Center on its website. There, you can easily find answers to common queries you may have. They also provide 24/7 support via email and live chat.

Finally, the platform offers extensive third-party integrations so that you can connect the system to your existing business software tools.

Pricing

GetResponse offers a 30-day free trial which allows up to 1,000 contacts, no credit card required. There are also a few flexible pricing plans with tons of extra features.

The Basic Plan starts at $15 monthly for 1,000 contacts and some of the features include email marketing, Facebook & Google ads, and autoresponders.

The Plus Plan starts at $49 monthly for 1,000 contacts and includes everything in the Basic Plan plus several other features such as an automation builder for 5 workflows, contact scoring & tagging, 3 team members, and so on.

The Professional Plan starts at $99 monthly for 1,000 contacts and includes everything in the Plus Plan plus other features such as unlimited automation, web push notifications, 5 users, and so on.

The Max Plan, which is quote-based, offers everything in the Pro Plan plus transactional emails as a paid add-on, dedicated support, SSO, etc.

Pros

• Possibly the easiest email platform to use
• Intelligent list automation
• Spam and design testing offered
• Powerful autoresponder features
• Strong email marketing features on offer

Cons

• Underwhelming analytics
• No 24/7 phone support
• Deliverability can be improved

5. Sendinblue

Best Email Marketing Software for Automation.

Sendinblue is an all-in-one marketing platform that allows users to generate leads and build relationships through integrated tools for marketing automation, email campaigns, landing-page creation, and SMS marketing.

Sendinblue offers you a comprehensive set of email marketing tools and solutions. You can segment your contact list according to demographics or targets that are most likely to buy from you. You can create customized sign-up forms and embed them on your landing pages.

The intuitive drag-and-drop email builder lets you create eye-catching emails to help you catch the attention of your targets. Product enquiries, customer complaints, payment follow-ups, and other such concerns that require immediate attention may be handled via the platform’s chat functionality.

Besides offering great options for email customization and design, you can also send your emails according to your leads’ digital behavior. You can make the platform send emails and promotional SMSs when triggered by certain actions on your leads’ end.

To ensure that email sending is coordinated, the platform lets you map out all the emails and triggers in a campaign in a workflow that represents your marketing funnel.

Furthermore, you get send-time optimization, which means that it can analyze the best time to deliver your emails and deliver them at that time. These automation features will have you working less to win more clients and customers.

Sendinblue also comes with integrated CRM features that allow you to automate the organization of your contact list. The platform automatically sorts your contacts according to parameters you set. This feature means that when you generate a multitude of new leads, you do not have to sort them manually.

The platform also offers an integrated solution for Facebook ads, allowing you to create ad launch Facebook ads to boost the reach and engagement of your campaigns.

Moreover, Sendinblue’s collaboration features are superb. You can create and assign tasks to your team members, share documents through the shared inbox, and contact team members directly through the live chat functionality.

Sendinblue offers multichannel support, allowing you to contact the vendor through email, phone, or their website. You can also take advantage of live training sessions to ensure a smooth and seamless experience.

Pricing

All Sendinblue plans offer unlimited contacts, with the Free Plan permitting you to send up to 300 emails per day.

The Lite Plan starts at $25 monthly and allows you to send up to 10,000 emails monthly with no sending limit. You also get email support, custom branding, A/B testing, and advanced statistics.

The Premium Plan starts at $65 monthly and allows you to send up to 20,000 emails monthly with no daily limit. It includes everything in Lite plus marketing automation, multi-user access, Facebook ads, landing pages, and phone support.

The Enterprise Plan is quote-based and includes everything in Premium plus custom email volume, priority sending, over 20 landing pages, access for over 10 users, SSO, access to a dedicated customer success manager, and other advanced features.

Pros

• Basic CRM functionality
• Impressive automation options
• Wide range of auto-responders other transactional email features

Cons

• Account setup can be tedious
• Basic templates are poorly-designed

6. ConvertKit

Best Email Platform for Smaller Audiences.

Designed for business owners who create and share online content such as YouTubers, course creators, bloggers, podcasters, and the likes, ConvertKit is a cloud-based lead generation and email marketing platform.

With workflow automation, intuitive drag-and-drop sequences, landing page templates, opt-in forms, and other features, the platform helps to automate email marketing and increase your subscriber list.

The platform allows you to create custom, responsive opt-in forms and embed them on your site. You can create an unlimited number of forms and each will adapt to the size and shape of the section where they are added (sidebar, end-of-post, or elsewhere).

You can also set specific opt-in forms for specific posts with custom CTAs for each post. Out of the box, the system offers three landing page templates that you can customize to your needs by changing text, patterns, textures, and colors, all without coding. Other changes can be made by adding custom CSS.

The platform gives you full control over every aspect of your email sequences, including delivery order, schedule, and content. Email personalization is also provided as you can automatically populate personalization fields with subscribers’ info. You can also specify the dates and times your emails will be sent.

With ConvertKit, you can also send email blasts to your entire subscriber base or send personalized messages to specific groups or segments of your mailing list—you can use this feature to announce product launches, discounts, new blog posts, and so on.

The platform allows you to save custom segments for campaigns you may run in the future. And you can exclude segments from your broadcast messages such as people who may have bought the product being advertised in the email.

As mentioned earlier, ConvertKit allows you to set up custom automated workflows triggered by events such as completed courses, product purchases, new subscriptions, and so on. The software offers blueprints for workflow automation that cover product pitches, webinars, onboarding, product launches, and so on.

The system also offers other benefits such as zero charges for duplicate subscribers, Zapier integration, and constant upgrades and new-feature additions, among several other benefits.

Pricing

ConvertKit offers a completely Free Plan for up to 1,000 subscribers that features unlimited landing pages & forms, email broadcasts, digital product & subscription sales, and email support.

The Creator Plan starts at $29/month for 1,000 subscribers and adds free migration for other email tools and automated funnels & sequences.

The Creator Pro Plan starts at $59/month with 1,000 subscribers and adds subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, newsletter referral system, and Facebook custom audiences.

Pros

• Comprehensive contact-tagging capabilities
• Intuitive automation designer

Cons

• The price quickly adds up for larger subscriber bases
• No live chat or phone support

7. Moosend

Email Marketing Platform for Help You Create, Execute, and Measure Your Email Campaigns with Easy-to-Use Features.

Powerful, easy-to-use, and outstanding, Moosend is an email marketing automation platform that facilitates the creation, execution, and management of email campaigns. Thousands of businesses choose Moosend because, with it, they can send the right email to the right people at the right time, automate their email workflows, and boost their return on marketing dollars.

The level of automation you can achieve is increased with this tool. Moosend allows you to automate email workflows so that you can be free to focus on engaging with your customers speedily and accurately.

You can set up Moosend to execute specific tasks when certain trigger events occur. The workflow automation capability helps reduce the instances of issues such as cart abandonment and helps you gain insight into the behavior of your visitors.

Moosend also includes email analytics. The inbuilt analytics tool is simple yet powerful and allows you to monitor and assess your email campaigns’ performance, giving you insights into areas that can be improved.

The real-time data the system provides helps you identify what devices and email clients your emails are viewed on, which links your subscribers click on, and when your subscribers are most active during the day.

The platform also offers third-party integrations, and Moosend allows users to integrate their website or app to speed up transactional email delivery.

Pricing

Moosend comes with a Free Forever plan that requires no credit card to sign up for. This plan offers unlimited emails, sign-up forms, subscription forms, and reporting & analytics.

The Pro Plan starts at $8 monthly and adds landing pages, an SMTP server, transactional emails, 5 team members, and phone support.

The Enterprise Plan is quote-based and adds a dedicated account manager, SSO & SAML, on-boarding & migration, custom reporting, service-level agreement, and 10 team members.

Pros

• A robust free plan that is ideal for organizations with less than 1,000 subscribers
• Easy-to-use campaign editor
• Pre-built automation templates available

Cons

• No native SMS capability
• No mobile app

8. Omnisend

Best Email Marketing Platform for Ecommerce.

With Omnisend, you can create an omnichannel marketing strategy for your business. The software offers solutions for email, social media, SMS, and other channels in a single platform, allowing you to reach more customers and boost revenue.

No matter what channel you use, Omnisend offers features that can help you streamline and optimize your marketing. You can create personalized emails from built-in templates or automate the segmentation and sending of the emails. The platform’s Facebook Messenger and SMS marketing capabilities also make it easier to reach out and connect with your customers.

Besides, Omnisend also empowers you with effective, engaging lead forms to help boost your lead capture rates. You get various types of forms for collecting subscriber information such as popups, signup boxes, and even the more interactive Wheels of Fortune. The system allows you to seamlessly integrate these forms into your marketing campaigns.

Additionally, you get A/B testing, a campaign booster to resend emails, and a content editor to help you quickly whip up engaging emails.

Also, since marketing campaigns are nothing without great analytics and reporting, the platform provides smart analytics and reporting functionality, keeping you informed about the performance of your campaigns with hard figures and statistics. This information is displayed via real-time dashboards and click maps.

Pricing

The Free-Forever Plan comes with email campaigns, 15,000 emails, signup forms, boxes & popups, and reports.

The Standard Plan starts at $16 monthly and comes with everything in the free plan plus email automation, SMS campaigns & automation, audience segmentation, and 24/7 email & chat support, among other features.

The Pro Plan starts at $99 monthly and adds $99 per month in free SMS credits, web push notifications, advanced reporting, Google Customer Match, Facebook custom audiences, and a dedicated customer success manager (for users with at least 15,000 contacts).

Finally, the Enterprise Plan, which is quote-based, comes with unlimited emails and adds free migration from other email services, deliverability support, and a custom IP address.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Full template library allows for a quick start
• Makes targeting easy with smart segmentation
• Automation workflows are available for several channels

Cons

• Requires a paid plan to access the best features
• No mobile app

9. Drip

Powerful Email Marketing Software with a Visual Workflow Builder.

Drip is a cloud-based platform that allows you to visually design and build email marketing campaigns, as well as to automate marketing processes. The solution comes equipped with innumerable trigger points and actions that you can use to customize and automate your email campaign workflows.

The platform supports all kinds of marketing and promotional email campaigns to suit the needs of individuals, teams, and organizations. It also allows you to send targeted emails and special messages to a subset of your subscribers.

With Drip, creating an email campaign is a fun, intuitive process. The visual workflow builder lets you build your customer journey meticulously, complete with triggers and corresponding actions. Each step of the way, you get tips to guide you and give you the information you need to complete each process.

Automations eliminate the need to manually respond to each trigger and move customers further along the customer journey. The system comes with an abundance of assorted triggers and appropriate responses included in the automation builder to save you time.

Besides, Drip allows you to target campaigns to specific subscriber segments. You can send one-off emails, drip campaigns, email blasts. This way, your subscribers only receive emails that are relevant to them.

Additionally, the platform equips you with widgets, triggered popups, embedded forms, and hosted forms to capture more leads and grow your mailing list. Plus, Drip comes equipped with tools to verify emails, ensuring that your email lists are clean and healthy.

Through its API and bountiful pre-built third-party integrations, you can connect with your favorite apps and solutions, thus extending the functionality of the program and gaining insights that empower your business.

Pricing

After the 14-day free trial period, you can get 500 contacts, unlimited emails, email support, all third-party integrations, and other features for one simple price of $19 monthly. The price increases with the size of your contact list.

For SMS, you pay $0.015 per SMS sent on a pay-as-you-go basis. So, for an additional $15 monthly, you can get 1,000 SMS sends monthly. You can only send SMSs to US numbers, and you can cancel the plan anytime.

Pros

• Free trial available
• Feature-rich
• Countless integrations available
• Robust CRM

Cons

• No phone support
• It may be overpriced for low-volume emailers

10. Autopilot

Sales-focused Email Marketing Software.

Autopilot offers a multi-channel-marketing automation platform that meets the needs of your business. It is a cloud-based software that helps companies automate their sales and marketing touchpoints and get more customers.

With the platform, you can delight your existing customers and convert more leads to customers by creating personalized customer journeys with texts and emails sent to the right people at the right time.

Autopilot provides the flexibility and ease that most businesses need. The simple user interface makes marketing automation an enjoyable experience. The UI is attractive and modern, complete with a cute mascot.

The solution is not surprisingly popular with sales managers, customer success managers, and marketers who use it to make sure that they stay in touch with customers and leads.

Autopilot provides built-in integrations to lead intelligence, marketing, sales, and CRM tools to make it easy to keep in touch with leads and customers via emails, SMSs, and even physical mail.

The built-in integrations allow you to connect apps such as Twilio, Lob, Salesforce, and Segment, as well as your proprietary apps.

The system also offers analytics and tracking presented via pre-built reports to help you make decisions and close sales more quickly. It offers campaign management and ROI reporting.

With Autopilot, you get end-to-end marketing automation features that free your sales and marketing teams from IT. The drag-and-drop interface means that it is simple enough for non-tech teams and individuals to build and execute campaigns.

Besides these, the system offers bulk data imports and exports; action-based trigger automation; HTML email editor, unlimited custom fields on sign-in forms; dynamic text personalization; a knowledge base; unlimited emails; static and dynamic smart list segmentation; and email support, among other features.

Pricing

There are three simple plans: Silver, Gold, and Platinum.
The Silver Plan costs $49 per month and offers all features for 2,000 contacts.
The Gold Plan costs $149 per month and offers all features for 5,000 contacts.
The Platinum Plan costs $249 per month and offers all features for 10,000 customers.
To get more than 10,000 contacts, you’ll need to contact the vendor for a quote.

Besides, there are optional add-ons that you can get for an extra fee. They are as follows:

• Expert setup and training for $1,699
• VIP support for $199 per month
• Salesforce CRM integration for $199 per month
• Custom IPs for $149 each per month
• Activity streams for $199 per month

Pros

• Beautiful UI
• Bountiful workflow and auto-responder options available

Cons

• No phone support
• Limited email templates

11. AWeber

Pure-Play Email Marketing Platform with a Best-in-class Autoresponder and Vast Feature Set.

With its rich feature set and superior autoresponder, AWeber is considered by many experts and professionals as one of the best email marketing platforms available on the market today.

AWeber helps you automate the process of delivering personalized, professionally-designed emails and targeted messages to customers, as well as follow-up emails according to the schedule you decide on. This allows you to establish strong relationships with prospects and enhance or maintain relationships with existing customers.

The platform is very popular with email marketing newbies and veterans alike. It comes with advanced autoresponders that simplify and streamline customer interaction and engagement like never before.

AWeber’s campaign creation mechanism is slightly different than similar marketing systems. You can create personalized messages or follow-up series and autoresponders with an intuitive drag-and-drop tool.

There are pre-made templates available to get you started quickly, but you are encouraged to build yours from scratch as well. You also gain access to data and reports that help you make better decisions so that you can devise and execute improved strategies and achieve even greater success.

A huge highlight for AWeber is its stellar customer support. They regularly offer live training webinars for newbies to email marketing, and they give users access to an in-house team of highly knowledgeable, effective, and responsive email marketing professionals.

The platform also allows you to manage contacts flexibly and effectively, as well as to create personalized subscriber lists. AWeber goes beyond simply categorizing contacts; it will give insights into where each customer comes from and whether they bought a product or subscribed to a service. This means that you can make smarter, better-informed business decisions.

AWeber boasts advanced integration options to tools such as Zendesk, WordPress, PayPal, LeadPages, Cyfe, Launch Effect, Drupal, Raven, Unbounce, Magento, and so on.

Pricing

AWeber offers a Free-Forever Plan for up to 500 subscribers. It comes with 3,000 email sends per month, 1 list profile, email automation, hundreds of email templates, dynamic content, unlimited landing pages with loads of templates and custom domains, signup forms, basic segmentation, subscriber tagging, and simple analytics, among other features.

The Pro Plan is priced according to the number of subscribers you have and comes with all the features that the platform has to offer which includes everything in the free plan plus unlimited email send and list profiles, split testing, behavioral automation, cart abandonment, custom branding, custom segmentation, and advanced analytics, among other features.

For $19 monthly, you get up to 500 subscribers.
For $29 monthly, you get up to 2,500 subscribers.
For $49 monthly, you get up to 5,000 subscribers.
For $69 monthly, you get up to 10,000 subscribers.
For $149 monthly, you get up to 25,000 subscribers.
For more than 25,000 subscribers, contact the vendor for a quote.

Pros

• Unlimited email sends
• Superb knowledge base
• Low-priced plans
• Extensive reporting functionalities

Cons

• No imports from third-party address books

12. MailChimp

The Gold Standard in Email Marketing Services for SMBs.

Possibly the most popular email software on this list, MailChimp offers feature-rich plans for small and growing businesses, as well as powerful features for larger organizations. MailChimp is known for offering low-cost plans which are great for startups.

They also offer advanced analytics to enhance your business and strong tech tools to help you use email to effectively reach clients and potential customers, market your products and services with ease, and close sales. Its ease-of-use and affordability make it a powerhouse in the email marketing services market.

MailChimp makes it easy to create, launch, and analyze email and advertising campaigns. This email platform allows you to manage your subscriber list, track your emails, and generate custom reports.

Also, you can view relevant metrics such as open, click-through and success rates. The platform also gives you the option to build your own email templates from scratch or to select from a wide range of templates.

With the mobile app, you can send and track your campaigns from any device. And you can take advantage of the abundant tutorials to learn and master the system and keep improving your campaigns.

Pricing

Despite its low-priced plans, MailChimp is still one of the best free email services on the market. Startups and businesses with a small budget can get their email marketing efforts off the ground with the free plan as it allows you to have up to 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails monthly.

The Essentials Plan starts at $9.99 monthly and grants you a wide range of exciting features such as multi-step journeys, custom branding, A/B testing, and other features.

The Standard Plan starts at $14.99 monthly and comes with a customer-journey builder, send-time optimization, and dynamic content, to mention just a few of the features.

The Premium Plan starts at $299 monthly and gives you advanced segmentation, comparative reporting, as well as unlimited seats & role-based access, among several other features.

Pros

• Has become a full-featured marketing platform
• A slew of powerful automation options available
• Comprehensive third-party integrations available
• Superb free plan and highly-flexible pricing

Cons

• Reporting needs to be improved

How to Choose the Best Small Business Email Marketing Service Provider

There are tons of options for email marketing tools out there, each with its unique set of features, price points, target users, unique selling proposition, and even use cases. This can make choosing the best email service provider for your business a real chore.

To make this choice easier, we’ve provided 4 tips to help you choose the right email marketing platform for your business.

1. Define Your Email Marketing Strategy

How will your email service fit into your overall email marketing strategy? You need to figure this out before choosing an email service provider. This can be accomplished by asking yourself the following questions:

• What are the goals I’m looking to achieve with email marketing?
• How do I intend to use the email service I choose to achieve these goals?
• Exactly what kind of email content will I be sending? Promotional emails? Newsletters? Event invites?
• Do I want to create my emails from professionally designed, customizable templates, or from scratch with code?
• What email metrics are crucial to the success of my email strategy?
• What functionalities will make achieving my goals easier?

By answering these questions, you can more easily narrow down your options to those offerings that offer the exact features you need.

2. Consider the Email Marketing Features You Need

If you have outlined your email marketing strategy and answered the questions in the first tip above, it should be clearer to you what features you need for your business. Some features to consider include:

• Templates: Templates help you to create professional-looking emails in minutes. If you desire the ability to create emails quickly and without code, then you need an email service that offers a vast library of highly-customizable and engaging email and newsletter templates. You also need to make sure that the system you choose offers templates for the kind of email content you’ll be sending. If you’ll be sending a lot of newsletters, you want a system that offers tons of newsletter templates, and the same goes for other types of email content.
• Automation: Choosing an email service with robust automation options is crucial since you probably can’t spend all day sending and responding to emails. Your email service needs to offer you the ability to create workflows that handle the bulk of the work for you. For instance, you can set up your emails for the entire year at the very beginning of the year and shift your focus to other things while your email service takes care of the rest.
• Analytics: Your chosen email service should provide you with the right tools to measure the performance of your email campaigns. You need to be able to monitor such metrics as email opens, engagement, clicks, unsubscribes, and ROI. And you need to be able to track the performance of your whole strategy as well as that of specific campaigns.
• Mobile optimization: Considering that nearly 68% of all emails are opened on a mobile device, it only makes sense that your emails should be optimized to display perfectly on both mobile and desktop. If your email service does not offer mobile-responsive templates, you could risk alienating the majority of your audience and missing out on potential sales.

Choosing an email service that offers the right combination of features is crucial to the success of your email marketing strategy.

3. Consider Your Overall Budget for Email Marketing

Thankfully, the abundance of email marketing platforms on the market ensures that no matter your budget, there are plenty of options to choose from. There are free tools that offer just the basics and enterprise-grade platforms that can automate your entire marketing.

Whatever you choose, remember that email marketing is not about shelling out big bucks but about getting the functionalities you need at a reasonable price. For all you know, you may not need all the features offered by an expensive email service; in fact, you may only need the barebones features offered by a free service.

In this case, choosing such an expensive option will constitute a waste of resources. You may find that your needs don’t fit neatly into the pricing plans of any provider. You’ll be better off looking for providers that offer custom pricing plans

4. Consider the Customer Support Offered by Each Email Platform

Because there will always be instances where you need a little guidance or help from an expert, customer support should never be an afterthought. You should be able to reach out to helpful and knowledgeable customer service reps when you need help.

To test the quality of a vendor’s customer service, visit their website and check if they offer 24/7 worldwide support. You can also call the customer care number or email them to see how quickly they respond.

Also, check if the vendor offers any training resources on their website. Find out if they offer blogs, webinars, e-books, videos, knowledge bases, and other such tutorial content that detail how the platform’s features work. Lastly, check if they have an FAQ section on their website.

With these tips, you should have an easier time choosing an email service since you now have a clearer picture of the features you need and how much you’re willing to spend.

Email Marketing Services for Small Business FAQ

Which Email Marketing Service Should I Choose?

The email marketing service you choose ultimately comes down to your business needs and budget.

By defining your email strategy, considering the features you need to execute your strategy and achieve your goals, evaluating your budget, and ensuring that the options available to you offer top-notch customer support, choosing an email marketing software should be much easier for you.

That said, consider these recommendations:

• Our overall top recommendation is HubSpot Marketing as it offers the most comprehensive set of tools to automate your entire marketing. But its pricing makes it better suited to mid-sized and larger enterprises.
• For small businesses, our top recommendation is ActiveCampaign.
• If automation is a priority to you, then Sendinblue is your best bet.
• And for e-commerce, look no further than Omnisend.

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